Remember all those pesky voter-ID laws that state officials have been trying to enact? The embattled plan of Gov. Rick Scott to go through voter rolls with a fine-toothed chainsaw and excise anyone named Manuel Lopez*? All that was done in the name of eliminating the supposed minions of noncitizens sneaking their way into our democratic system.

That so-called voter purge finally led to a conviction, of 52-year-old Josef Sever. He voted, under a "no party affiliation," in Broward County in the November 2008 election.

And watch out, folks. He's Canadian.

The Herald reports that Sever was discovered while Scott was going ahead with the initial stages of his review of the voting rolls. But he was a bit of a unique case:

According to court records, Sever's illegal voting was discovered during Gov. Rick Scott's controversial push to identify potential non-citizens on voting rolls using information from the state motor vehicle agency. Though the Department of State amassed a list of 180,000 potential non-citizens registered to vote, it only sent one name --Sever's -- to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate criminally.

Sever also admitted to buying firearms several times in Hialeah using a false U.S. citizenship.

Now, he's more or less the unwitting poster child for the kind of folks Scott has been hunting for. But they're not gonna play this right. Instead of seeing him as a criminal, the GOP should move to have Sever pardoned and hold him up on a pedestal. After all, he abandoned the universal health care and tasty maple syrup of the Commie-nadian provinces to move to Florida, buy guns, and participate in the glory of our God-given democracy.

Unless, of course, he voted for Obama. Then boot his ass back over the border.

*not really.

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